George Du Maurier

“ Du Maurier was not a censor of morals, but of manners, which indeed are or ought to be the flower of morals, but not their root, and his deflections from the straight line in the destiny of his creations must not be too seriously regarded. I take it that the very highest fiction is that which treats itself as fact, and never once allows itself to be otherwise. ”

“ I was thinking, with a pang, just before I put my pen to the paper, that the death of George du Maurier must be a fact of stale interest to the reader already, and that it would be staler yet by the time my words reached him. So swiftly does the revolving world carry our sorrow into the sun, our mirth into the shade, that it is as if the speed of the planet had caught something of the impatience of age, and it were hurried round upon its axis with the quickened pulses of senility. ”

“ It is an attitude which I find swaggering in Fielding, insincere in Sterne, mocking in Heine, and inartistic in Thackeray; but Du Maurier made it lovable. His whole story was a confidence; whatever illusion there was resided in that fact; you had to grant it in the beginning, and he made you grant it gladly. A trick? Yes; but none of your vulgar ones; a species of legerdemain, exquisite as that of the Eastern juggler who plants his ladder on the ground, climbs it, and pulls it up after him into the empty air. ”

“ Not before in our literature has anything more distinct, more individual, made itself felt. I have assumed to trace its descent, from this writer to that; but it was only partly so descended; in what made it surprising and captivating, it was heaven-descended. We shall be the lonelier and the poorer hereafter for the silence which is to be where George du Maurier might have been. ”

“ But perhaps this is a delusion of ours who dwell in the vicissitude of events, and there are still spots on the earth's whirling surface, lurking-places of quiet, where it seems not to move, and there is time to remember and to regret; where it is no astonishing thing that a king should be a whole month dead, and yet not forgotten. ”

“ The humor which shone upon every rank, and every variety of character, never abashed the lowly, never insulted women, never betrayed the trust which reposed in its traditions of decency and generosity. ”

“ This theory will not justify itself to any critical judgment; one might as well say, if some great novelist distinguished for his sense of color took to painting, that he had always been an artist. The wonder of Du Maurier's essay, the astounding spectacle of his success, cannot be diminished by any such explanation of it. He commenced novelist in Peter Ibbetson, and so far as literature was concerned he succeeded in even greater fulness than he has succeeded since. ”

“ It is a very manly sentimentality; we need not be ashamed of sharing it; one should rather be ashamed of disowning its emotions. It is in its sweetness, as well as its manliness, that I find the chief analogy between Du Maurier's literature and his art. ”

“ It wants seriousness, it wants the last respect for the reader's intelligence, it wants critical justification; it wants whatever is the very greatest thing in the very greatest novelists; the thing that convinces in Hawthorne, George Eliot, Tourguénief, Tolstoy. ”

“ If we think of any other caricaturist's art, how bitter it is apt to be, how brutal, how base! The cruelties that often pass for wit, even in the best of our own society satires, never tempted him to their ignoble exploitation ”

“ It touches, it appeals, it consoles; and it flatters, too; if it turns the head, if it intoxicates, well, it is better to own the fact that it leaves one in not quite the condition for judging it. I made my tacit protest against it after following Trilby, poor soul, to her apotheosis at the hands of the world and the church; but I fell a prey to it again in the first chapters of The Martian, and I expect to continue in that sweet bondage to the end.
II.
If I venture to say that sentimentality is the dominant of the Du Maurier music, it is because his art has made sentimentality beautiful ”

“ Sir Binks (who always piques himself on saying just the right thing) .—"A—what I like so much about the milkmaid, dontcherknow, is that your husband hasn't fallen into the usual mistake of painting a lady dressed up in milkmaid's clothes! She's so unmistakably a milkmaid and nothing else, dontcherknow!" ”

“ The worst of celebrities in these democratic days is that they won't come unless you ask their wives and families, too! So I ask the wives and families, and the wives and families come in their thousands, if you please, and the celebrities stay at home and go to bed. ”

“ Jones, the great historian, and Professor Brown, the famous philologist (whose wives have not been asked) , bring up the rear together.
The Doctor.—"Well, Professor, we may be of less consequence than the rest, but at all events we're the oldest and the most renowned!"
THINGS ONE COULD WISH TO HAVE EXPRESSED OTHERWISE
Puzzled Hostess.—"I beg your pardon, Lord Bovril, but will you tell me whether I ought to take your arm, or Prince Sulkytoff's, or the Duke's?" ”